Limiting comments to subscribers

Posted Nov 17, 2003 23:35 UTC (Mon) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link]

"Non-subscribers currently post about 1/3 of the comments on the site; almost all of them are non-abusive. I really hesitate to silence them just to take care of one or two bozos."

I am not a subscriber and though I don't post a lot, I'm OK with the *privilege* of posting being restricted to those who pay. If someone wants to *pay* in order to troll, well I could only laugh at them...

"What I may do in the short term is add an option you can set which hides all non-subscriber comments."

Do you have the ability to easily just delete such postings? (Eg. a Delete button next to each one) I believe that one of the countermeasures to graffiti on buildings, bridges, etc., is to immediately remove it so the miscreants can't gaze in satisfaction at their "work". You know the little trolls will come back to see the reaction. Remove their "graffiti". Once recess is over, they'll be otherwise occupied anyway. :)

Posted Nov 18, 2003 12:55 UTC (Tue) by French_Guest (guest, #16946) [Link]

I thought that comments on lwn.net could be moderated, but this would probably cost too much employee time and money for lwn.

Other possibility : the following french linux site shows an interesting auto-moderating system :
https://linuxfr.org/

They use Templeet (http://templeet.org/), a GPL software.

An authorized subset of readers vote for comments (+1 or -1), and all comments with negative notes get somehow blanked. For lwn.net, I think you could easily configure and adapt the software to your needs. For example, so that only subscribers vote, or designed moderators, or any subset of people you trust. Accounts with too much trolls (for example more than 3 negative notes lesser than -10) could get disabled for a few weeks (a fair practice, imho).

I think this would prevent abuse of your ressources through spammers and trolls, with little work more for the lwn employees.